Unless otherwise indicated herein, the materials described herein are not prior art to the claims in the present application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Cloud computing environments may include software-as-a-service (SaaS) and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) environments. SaaS may provide a user with access to an application software package that may include, but is not limited to, e-mail, groupware, customer relationship management (CRM), and the like. PaaS may provide users with a computing platform on which user-specific applications may be deployed and executed.
When a SaaS environment is updated, business flows that users have constructed on the SaaS environment may have to be migrated to function properly in the updated SaaS environment, which may include one or more updated calling protocols, parameters, and/or Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). Analogously, when a PaaS environment is updated, user-deployed applications may have to be migrated to function properly in the updated PaaS environment, which may include updated middleware. Updates to SaaS/PaaS environments in some cases may be unavoidable, such as in response to discovering a security hole or for load distribution. Migration may be disruptive and/or costly for users.
In some cases, users who wish to continue using a specific version of a SaaS/PaaS environment and users who wish to use a latest version may coexist in a given cloud computing environment. As such, it is difficult to update the cloud computing environment all at once. Moreover, maintenance costs to maintain increasingly older versions of SaaS/PaaS environments typically increase with increasing age.